History of Love, the Resurrectionist, the Limits of Enchantment

Three fairly literary books this time.

The History of Love is about a book called The History of Love and its author, although we don't actually learn that till near the end. Along the way, we meet Leo and Alma, the former a Jew who escaped the Nazis, the latter a young girl looking for a father figure. The actual story is very complex, maybe needlessly so -- Kraus does a lot of maneuvering to get everyone into the right places at the right times. I also felt that it was a book aiming to be uplifting -- Leo dies in the arms of someone who knows who he is, instead of anonymously, which was his great fear.

But I felt more depressed than uplifted at the end. To get to this blessed state, Leo has spend the last 20? 30? years friendless and alone, to the point where he had to make up an imaginary friend just to get by. Alma never really finds what she's looking for, and her brother is clearly autistic, and presumably undiagnosed -- he's seeing a therapist by the end, but it's not clear that that's going to help.

I'll probably have to read The Resurrectionist at least once more to understand what Jack O'Connell, the author, is saying. The novel starts with a clear delineation between reality and fantasy, but by the end, it's not really clear to what extent the protagonist is hallucinating. Overall, it was a really great mind-bending read, but I felt it was seriously marred by the noir elements. Unlike Will Baer, who uses the noir elements of his work as a background against which the more literary elements can work, O'Connell keeps foregrounding them, and it feels like the rest of the story is fighting against the more stock pieces.

Why is Sweeny the pharmacist not dismissed for beating up a co-worker on the first day of the job? How does Nadia the nurse get a job at a research hospital with no credentials? How can Buzz Cote be taken seriously as a father figure?

I'd read other books by O'Connell, because the good stuf was really great, but I feel like he just missed hitting the heights of, say, the Phineas Poe trilogy.

Lastly, I just finished Graham Joyce's Limits of Enchantment. Joyce is revisiting the same ground he visited in The Facts of Life, but I liked this one better. Mammy feels more real, less idealized. Some of her wacky ideas turn out to have sense, but she's not infallible. In Facts, Cassie just sort of floats through life, with no real consequences for her detachment. Here, we see that no-one can really get away with that -- the real world will reach in, regardless of how little you care for it.